After more than 39(!) years of work as a Christian in higher education, I am using this blog to share my thoughts on teaching and learning in undergraduate education, related and unrelated to orthodox Christian faith. Please peruse the archives for a wide variety of topics.
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Friday, May 24, 2013

I believe I am allowed to plagiarize myself. This is also posted to my other blog.

In the Ed.D. program I am pursuing, it is an interesting, sometimes
baffling, mixture of touchy-feely procedures and hard core empiricism.
That is ultimately a good thing, although I have had some trouble
fitting into both categories at once. I can do positivistic social
sciences thinking; that's what my first master's was immersed in. I can
do liberal arts, reflective, hermeneutical thinking; that's the second
master's. But doing them at the same time is another matter.

Our
goal is an action research project (dissertation), which I think it is
fair to say we are struggling with. I have sent a draft of the
prospectus to my advisor, but I was dissatisfied with it as soon as I
hit the SEND button. How nice it would be to retrieve emails before
they are read! No such luck.

In class last Saturday we
had a guest speaker, whom I will not name. He was interesting, and I
hope to read his book one day (it's not exactly a best seller on Amazon,
but based on his presentation I think it would be worthwhile). He took
us through a LEARNING PATHWAYS GRID using the professor's case, which
was projected on the screen. I am glad she volunteered to be a guinea
pig or lab rat rather than we, because I think we would have been
uncomfortable. I am not crazy about people getting into my head and
trying to figure out my motives and "theories-in-use." That's my
business. As I have written before, it is hard enough to understand
one's assumptions and "theories-in-use." If someone can get to that
point of honestly confronting those, he/she can probably leave off
trying to change them to another day. I think the change part is harder
than it looks, which is the point of this post.

Anyway,
we went through the six steps of the LEARNING PATHWAYS GRID: desired
outcomes, actual outcomes, actions, frames, adjusted beliefs, and
desired actions. I watched more than anything, although some of the
students seemed very engaged with picking the prof's brain and case and
personality apart, and some things were said that shocked me. That kind
of brutal honesty is, well, awkward to say the least. The case itself
was a less-than-thirty-second snippet of conversation the professor had
had with a supervisor years ago.

But what I found
most interesting is that the professor said, "I am still struggling with
this same behavior after fifteen years."

What? All
this mind-opening and transformational learning methodology and nothing
is changing? Why go through these exercises if nothing changes? Why
search delicately and bluntly through one's assumptions, values, real
beliefs if nothing changes? I assumed that having more productive
behavior is the point of all this soul-searching.

The
visiting prof did explain that these behaviors are so deep-seated that
they take along time to change, and that what the grid, and other
methodologies can do (like action science) is give the user a bigger
repertoire of options for behavior (I would say communication behaviors,
primarily) and more self-awareness when we find ourselves in similar
situations.

Fair enough. But is that the best we can hope
for? This whole incident got me thinking about adult education and
spiritual transformation. My first response was, "These people need
Jesus," but that is too facile, a cliche, like the old bumpersticker,
"Jesus is the Answer." In the words of J. Vernon McGee, "But what's the
question?" However, I stand by the first response in spirit. We need
Jesus.

And this is not to say that the sin in
ourselves, that so easily besets us (and make no mistake, in this
professor's life it was an issue of pride, just as my opinionation and
bluntness is a matter of pride), will disappear as soon as we yield to
Jesus' control in our lives. No such promise is given, despite all the
gospel songs that seem to guarantee some new personality after
conversion.

The issue is that we do get growth
because we are not dependent on purely internal sources, on our will,
our own understanding, our own insights. We need an external source.
To reject the external source of Christ's death and resurrection, the
Father's love, and the Holy Spirit's power, is to continue in the sin
that is the core in the first place, pride and self-addiction. To keep
depending on self-searching to change ourselves is a cyclical madness,
really.

I just looked at the few plants in my
pathetic garden plot. I finally got them in: four tomatoes, four rows
of half-runner beans, four green pepper plants, six okra stalks (well,
that will come in August; right now the okra, which is a fun plant to
grow, is only a couple of inches high). We have had an abundance of
rain this spring, I was late getting the garden in (due to doctoral
work!), and it's been cool and not as sunny as tomatoes need. But
everything is growing (I understand the origin of the Jack and Beanstalk
story now--beans really come up quickly--edible kudzu). I have already
staked everything. I look forward to some produce, although it's all a
hobby, not a serious attempt at food supply.

However,
my good intentions, research, and soul-searching about my garden won't
matter if the weather stays cloudy and cool all summer (which would be a
nice change from last year's drought) or if we get a month of 95
degrees and no rain. The external sources of energy and nutrition for
the garden matter; the soil, no matter how fertile, and the plants, no
matter how healthy, do not exist in a vacuum.

The
feeble analogy has a point. We need external sources of spiritual power
to have transformative spiritual learning, and that means we must be
open to it and at the same time submissive to it--it being the
intervention of God in our lives, and that includes our understanding of
who God is. (see next post).

Can I say I am any
better than my professor? Of course not. I know that my own
introspective exercises have a type of wisdom but not a liberating one,
because they give us no way out, no escape from our own vicious cycles
and patterns of self-addicted behavior. In my case, responding
defensively to so much of what my husband says and not listening--not
listening to people in general, always having a smart or intellectual or
one-up comment or comeback, always being the knowledgeable one, the
expert, orating and lecturing instead of shutting up.

Of
course, all of this is about a totally God-centered world view, which
is not adopted over night. Also, God's method of this spiritual growth
(I prefer that to transformation, which only happens ultimately, not
everyday) is to use trials, but only if we can make meaning of those
trials or "disorienting dilemmas," to quote Mezirow. Trials are said to
make us better or bitter; I disagree. They can also make us baffled
and bemused.

Akyol,
Z., Vaughan, N., & Garrison, D. (2011). The impact of course duration on
the development of a community of inquiry. Interactive Learning Environments,
19(3), 231-246. doi:10.1080/10494820902809147

Dieter,
P. (2009). A faculty development program can result in an improvement of the
quality and output in medical education, basic sciences and clinical research
and patient care. Medical Teacher, 31(7), 655-659.
doi:10.1080/01421590802520972

Gibbs,
G., and M. Coffey. (2004). The impact of training of university teachers on
their teaching skills, their approach to teaching and the approach to learning
of their students. Active Learning in Higher Education, 5(1): 87-100.

Hardré,
P. L. (2012). Community college faculty motivation for basic research, teaching
research, and professional development. Community College Journal Of
Research & Practice, 36(8), 539-561.
doi:10.1080/10668920902973362

scholarship of teaching and
learning through faculty learning communities.New Directions for Teaching and
Learning, 97, 127-135.

Riel,
M.(1998).Education in the 21st
century:Just-in-time learning or
learning communities.Paper presented at
The Fourth
Annual Conference of the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research,
Abu Dhabi, May 24-26, 1998. http://faculty.pepperdine.edu/mriel/office/papers/jit-learning